Advent Calendar: Day 6

By Circe -

Sometimes, your groundbreaking new show is a hit. Sometimes not. On very rare occasions, it sparks a riot. "Le Sacré du Printemps" (music by Stravinsky, choreography by Nijinsky) was one of that last.

"Riot" is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. Not too long into the ballet, the audience stood up and started shouting their uncomplimentary reviews. Some of them threw things. A lot of them demanded their money back. The fuss was loud enough to drown out the orchestra; Nijinsky had to stand in the wings and scream the counts at the dancers to keep them on time. Nothing was, say, set on fire, which was a not necessarily a given back in the days when costumes were flammable and theaters were lit by gas or arc lamps.

In the audience's defense, while it is immediately recognizable today as a modern dance piece, modern dance did not exist when it premiered in 1913. If you bought a ticket expecting something along the lines of Petipa's "La Bayadère", and you got a bunch of awkward knock-kneed dancers wearing what in Edwardian times passed for cutting-edge runway fashion, you'd be confused and angry too.

As with many dance pieces even today, no filmed version of the original exists. The Joffrey Ballet in NYC reconstructed Nijinsky's choreography as best they could and mounted the production in 1987.

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